Little Poems in Prose

lips seemed like warm caskets of perfume, whence he exhaled a subtle scent, and every time he signed, musk-scented butterflies gat light, on their winged way, from the ardour of his breath. Around his purple tonic was twisted as a belt a gleaming serpent, who, with raised head, turned languorously toward him eyes that were like glowing coals. From this living girdle were suspended alternatively phials full of deadly liquids, shining knives, and surgical instruments. In his right hand he held another phial, filled with a luminous red liquid, and which bore these strange words: “Drink, this is my blood, the perfect cordial.” In the left hand he bore a violin, which he used, no doubt, to sing his pleasures and his sorrows, and to spread the contagion of his folly on the nights of the Witches’ Sabbath. From his delicate ankles dragged some rings of a broken chain of gold and when the constraint which this occasioned him made him lower his eyes to the ground, he contemplated vaingloriously the nails of his feet, brilliant and polished like well-worked stones. With his inconsolably sad eyes he looked upon me, with his eyes whence flowed an in- sidious intoxication. And he intones these words: “If thou wilt, if thou wilt, I will make